January 2013

Bezier Cam Designer Experiment The experiment is working. The JavaScript code allows a fixed number of points to be manipulated to create a poly-Bezier shape. The Bezier curve is drawn “by hand” for both the normal version and for the version that uses polar coordinates. The interesting thing…

I am playing around with some code related to Bezier curves. Although many programming languages provide a Bezier curve drawing function, I need my own. I need it so that I can translate a string of Bezier curves into polar coordinates for drawing a cam. See my older…

I have started work on adding cams to the Linkage program. It has taken me a while to add this feature because of the complex nature of cams. For instance, cams can be used to control valves in an engine or they can be used to control the…

I made a minor change to add keyboard commands to the Linkage program. It already supported the typical Control-C, Control-S, etc., keyboard shortcuts for operations like Copy and Save. It now support single key operations like C or J for Connect and Join, as well as a few…

I was just playing around with ideas for a pointless machine and came up with the mechanism shown in the video below. Pointless Machine with Pizzazz The idea was to make the mechanism do something beyond just a simple rotational movement. I will probably work some more on…

I have been experimenting with overlaying a div on top of the iframe used for the YouTube video player. So far, I have come up with a method of showing a high quality preview instead of the crappy thumbnail preview image that YouTube generates for my videos. There…

I am at that stumbling point between projects where I have many ideas and none of them is compelling. The current welded milk jug project is going slowly because I have lost a little bit of interest in it. A few weeks ago, I was trying to cut…